Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Jeffrey Beall is a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, but he's known online for his popular blog Scholarly Open Access, where he maintains a running list of open-access journals and publishers he deems questionable or predatory. Now, one of those publishers intends to sue Mr. Beall, and says it is seeking $1-billion in damages. The publisher, the OMICS Publishing Group, based in India, is also warning that Mr. Beall could be imprisoned for up to three years under India's Information Technology Act, according to a letter from the group's lawyer. Mr. Beall received the letter on Tuesday from IP Markets, an Indian firm that manages intellectual-property rights. 'I found the letter to be poorly written and personally threatening,' Mr. Beall said. 'I think the letter is an attempt to detract from the enormity of OMICS's editorial practices.' Mr. Beall believes he has documented all the statements he made about OMICS. The blog and the list, which is known to librarians and professors simply as 'Beall's List,' has led to Mr. Beall's being featured in The New York Times, Nature, and The Chronicle. The list now features more than 250 publishers that he considers to be 'potential, possible, or probable predatory' companies, which take advantage of academics desperate to get their work published. In separate blog posts, Mr. Beall details why he believes the companies are misleading. The OMICS Group's practices have received particular attention from Mr. Beall and some publications, including The Chronicle. In 2012, The Chronicle found that the group was listing 200 journals, but only about 60 percent had actually published anything. The owner of OMICS, Srinu Babu Gedela, said then that his company was not a 'predatory publisher' and was ramping up to be a 'leading player in making science open access.' IP Markets said OMICS was started six years ago and has 500 employees. On his blog, Mr. Beall accuses OMICS of spamming scholars with invitations to publish, quickly accepting their papers, then charging them a nearly $3,000 publishing fee after a paper has been accepted. He also alleges that the publisher uses the names of scholars without their permission to entice participants to attend scientific conferences and then promotes those conferences by using names "deceptively similar" to well-known, established conferences. For example, just one hyphen separates OMICS's Entomology-2013 conference from the Entomological Society of America's Entomology 2013 conference ..."